C. difficile is nearly under control, says hospital

Sault Area Hospital is down to one or two new cases of C. difficile a week and has gone several weeks without a new case, says Sharon Kirkpatrick, senior vice president and chief nursing officer.

At a hospital board meeting last night, Kirkpatrick talked about the hospital's plan to abate its outbreak of the potentially lethal infectious disease, Clostridium difficile.

As reported earlier by SooToday.com, the hospital found itself in an outbreak situation in June 2006.

Dr. Michael Gardam (shown), director of infection prevention and control from Toronto's University Health Network worked with hospital staff and administrators to set up a 26-point plan which began to be implemented in September.

Kirkpatrick said that the hospital has fully implemented 24 of those 26 control measures and partially implemented two of them.

"The two control measures we've partially covered are largely housekeeping issues," Kirkpatrick told the board.

Apparently the hospital is running short on disposable bedpans and hasn't been able to hire enough housekeeping staff to keep up with all the cleaning requirements in the rooms.

To compensate for the staff shortage, housekeeping is doing the infectious disease cleaning protocol in rooms where the disease has been discovered and regular cleaning in most other rooms, said interim chief of staff Dr. Alan McLean.

These control measures will have cost the hospital $4 to $5 million when complete, said interim Chief Executive Officer Ron Gagnon.

Sault Area Hospital hopes to recover much of that from the province under unforeseen expenses allowances.

Kirkpatrick said Dr. Gardam will consider the outbreak contained and officially over when the number of new cases is reduced to less than one per month.

She told the board she believes this is attainable, but it will be difficult since the hospital is so overcrowded.

"Really the ideal number to avoid outbreaks of infectious diseases is under 80 percent occupancy," said Dr. Gardam in his presentation to the board in December.

However, Dr. Gardam didn't include occupancy rate reduction in his list of containment measures and Kirkpatrick said she believes the hospital can get C. difficile under control no matter how many patients are in the facility.

But it will be a challenge, she said.